


The Demon Factory

by Rhinozilla



Category: Jak and Daxter
Genre: Body Horror, Dark Warrior Program, Human Experimentation, set sometime after Jak 3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-20
Updated: 2019-02-20
Packaged: 2019-11-01 04:02:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,108
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17859911
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rhinozilla/pseuds/Rhinozilla
Summary: Ashelin decides to see for herself the labs where the Dark Warrior Program took place. Every square inch of it is a nightmare, but the only monster that she finds is the one showing her around.





	The Demon Factory

Places like this were supposed to be underground. They were supposed to be hidden away as a shameful thing, to at least grant the rest of them the illusion of ignorance at what was happening. In the privacy of the elevator, Ashelin clenched her jaw, grinding her molars as the lift took her to the laboratory level of the Haven City prison.

No, that wasn’t how her father had done things. Why hide away your horrific deeds in dungeons when you could house them in one of the largest, most imposing buildings within the walls…where everyone could look at that fortress of a prison and know how easily that it could be their fate if they didn’t keep in line.

The scientist who met her when the elevator doors opened had the backbone to look her in the eye…and the intelligence to at least pretend to be remorseful of his role here. He had the appearance of someone young who had aged quickly under the stress of his work. The unfinished tattoos peeking out from the collar of his lab coat told her that he had failed to complete training to be a Krimzon Guard, but by his closely cropped hair, stiff posture, and dead expression, he had gotten pretty close.

“Your High—“ he started to bow.

“No.” Ashelin lifted an abrupt hand. “Let me stop you right there. The only reason that you are not rotting in one of the lower cells is because you are the last of the slime who worked on the Dark Warrior Program. Just tell me what I need to know, and count every breath that you take as a personal mercy from me.”

The man’s automated smile faltered only a bit. “So, I give you the tour, and THEN I get imprisoned anyway? How very gracious of our new governor.”

Ashelin narrowed her eyes and kept her shoulders square. “Just get started.”

As he led her down the main hallway to the…ugh…research and development section of the lab, Ashelin tried to not let her imagination explain the stench of blood and bile that floated from the walls. The scientist was already speaking, but it was information that she already knew. The Dark Warrior Program had not been abandoned after Jak escaped the prison. Far from it, he had been such a “success” in her father’s eyes that his experiments had been accelerating in intensity right up until his regime was overthrown.

She was aware of at least eight other people who had been imprisoned and forced to endure the dark eco experiments. They had found the remains of five bodies as the first phase of demolition began, only half-cremated and hastily buried under the northern corner of the prison. They were easily identified as casualties of the Dark Warrior Program from the poisonous purple gas that emanated from the body cavities along with the contorted, mutated state of their corpses.

Failed experiments thrown out like garbage.

“—and anyone with any affinity for channeling eco has become so rare, but somebody who could channel ALL forms of eco? How could he not be the best candidate?”

Ashelin was glad that she had left her weapons at home, or this sick bastard would have already had multiple bullets blown through his body.

They took a left turn, and the floor started to angle downward. She paused enough for the man to look back, a disgustingly reminiscent look on his face.

“It was easier to roll the subjects on gurneys…once they couldn’t walk on their own anymore…or had died, of course.” He got halfway through a shrug before thinking better of the gesture.

“I should have waited another ten minutes before ordering the Guard not to shoot on sight,” Ashelin seethed. “Waited until they found you.”

“But then…what about your private tour of our grand facility?”

Forget weapons, she could snap his neck with her bare hands.

The yellow glow of the chamber ahead of them drew her attention away from his back.

This room wasn’t as large as the main prison room, where the injection mechanism and restraining chair was. She had seen that area already. This…This was what she had needed to see, what she was forcing herself to witness.

How could she lead Haven out of this dark period without a full knowledge of what that darkness was? She needed to see it, in all of its nightmarish truth, before she turned this whole building into a flaming crater.

The yellow glow, as it turned out, was coming from three glass columns against the far wall. Each one was four feet in diameter and at least ten feet tall. They were filled with amber liquid…and bodies. The missing three bodies of the last Dark Warrior Program’s victims had never really been missing at all. Instead, they were here, suspended in preservative fluid, not even allowed to rot in a grave with dignity.

Two of the three corpses were warped by dark eco like the other five recovered bodies. Horns extended from their hairlines. Half lidded eyes hung open, black all the way around. Thick purple veins created webs along their bare skin. Teeth extended into fangs that pushed past shredded lips. Fingernails jutted out of nail beds, onyx and curved so as to serve no other function than to destroy. Their flesh was stretched taut over emaciated pelvic bones and ribcages, contrasting the unnaturally developed muscles of their arms and legs. Precise, surgical lines traced their torsos where the autopsies had been performed and their flesh resealed.

The body in the third container had no outward mutations, but her chalk pale skin and the telltale black eyes gave away her condition. There were considerably more autopsy lines criss crossing this corpse, searching for the internal changes brought on by the dark eco.

The scientist caught Ashelin staring and clearly misinterpreted her expression.

“She was our most promising subject. She lasted longer than any of the others, dying just a few weeks before we got Jak. In a lot of ways, he has her to thank for his success. Each of our failures moved us closer to the solution. We learned from our mistakes, corrected them with every subsequent experiment. She…came the closest, that’s for sure…the strongest natural channeling gift that we had ever seen…before Jak.”

Ashelin’s skin crawled as she took in the vacant expression on the body. She had only witnessed Jak transform once, seen the toll that it took when the dark eco receded and he changed back to normal. For the briefest moment, those black eyes had been as vacant as this woman’s. Just an absolute nothingness when neither the monster nor the man had the reins. A blink later, those eyes had been blue, and the vacancy had filled with chronic horror as Jak had realized what he had done in that state.

She couldn’t take it. She looked away from the body behind the glass.

“Jak was a child.” It slipped out of her, and she cringed.

“Children are like sponges.” The scientist waved a dismissive hand. “We found that they were more resilient than adults…more…capable of adapting to the biochemical changes that the dark eco introduced to their genetic structure.”

“Adapting…” She let the word hang in the air.

The scientist hummed, looking at the woman behind the glass with something close to admiration. “Yes…By introducing the dark eco before the subjects reach maturity, we found that most of them were able to absorb it…growth spurts and hormones and all that…What better conduit for the chaos of dark eco?”

“You talk like there were other minors that you did this to.”

“There were others.” So casually admitted. “They burned up before we could advance to the final phase of the program.”

Ashelin shook her head, pinching the bridge of her nose briefly. “After all this…this carnage…you all continued to push forward? To ruin more lives and kill more innocents?”

“Under your father’s orders.”

She bit her tongue and turned away. She wasn’t about to be sucked into the topic of her father’s morality, least of all with this cretin.

“We do have recordings of the treatments.”

Her head snapped around to stare at the scientist. “You WHAT?”

“The Baron insisted on having audio and visual recordings of every dark eco experiment on every subject that made it to the chair. Some of us took the liberty of making additional recordings of the subjects out of the chair, in their cells, purely for research purposes of course.” He clasped his hands behind his back. “I could show you—“

“I want them destroyed.”

For the first time, the scientist looked knocked off kilter. “You…destroyed?”

“As of this moment, I am seizing custody of every tape, back up tape, and any and all other audio and visual records relating to the Dark Warrior Program,” she said curtly.

“You can’t! Years of painstaking research…We are within reach of harnessing the most powerful substance on the planet…Destroying all of our knowledge would not bring those people back from the dead; it would only make their deaths pointless.”

“Their deaths were already pointless.”

“I thought the purpose of this jaunt through our labs was for you to see everything that we did, to fully understand what happened here. I guess it’s easier when it’s all notes on paper…preserved bodies…blood stained cell blocks…But to see it happen in motion, that’s where your fortitude falters, Madam Governor?” He had moved over to a metal cabinet, opening the doors to reveal packed rows of tape recordings.

He plucked one seemingly at random, turning on his heel and stalking back over to her, stopping before the desk that stood between them.

“Or maybe you’d prefer a more personal viewing, to mourn the dignity of your hero in private.”

He tossed the tape on the desk, and she didn’t need to look at the numbered code written on its face to know that it was Jak’s file…or one of his files.

She snatched up the tape and immediately snapped it in half, breaking those halves into more halves until it was a mess of metal and plastic falling to the desk.

“You’re disgusting,” she hissed. “I expect to take ALL of these records with me when I leave here today. The Freedom League will come to collect the three bodies, to be given proper burials far away from this hellhole. The rest of the research conducted here will be confiscated and dealt with as I see fit. If I find out that you have withheld even the smallest piece of information on any of these people that you destroyed, then I will personally make sure that instead of a solitary prison cell, you find yourself in the middle of the Wasteland. I guarantee you will find more mercy from me than you will from the desert.”

The scientist looked furious, but his anger was impotent. Ashelin took what small satisfaction she could from his rumpled state. The feeling only lasted as long as it took for her to throw all of the recordings into three large hard plastic crates. The crates were equipped with hover tech, and they lifted a foot off the ground when she activated the circular nodes on the sides. That enabled her to maneuver them herself. She didn’t want the files out of her sight until she watched them turn to ash in a fire.

“You’re welcome, by the way,” the scientist finally spoke.

Ashelin bit back the urge to vomit, guiding the hovering crates toward the inclined hallway, going back the way she’d come. She didn’t acknowledge his statement.

“If it hadn’t been for the Dark Warrior Program, Haven City wouldn’t have had its great hero Jak and all his…gifts…to fight the Metalheads…the Dark Makers…the KG Bots…”

Ashelin reached the elevator, punching the button and impatiently waiting for the doors to open.

“If it hadn’t been for the Dark Warrior Program,” she snarled, “you and your fellow vermin would have only been arrested instead of—“

The elevator doors opened, and two large Freedom League guards greeted her. She jerked her head in the scientist’s direction.

“Take him.”

She maneuvered the crates into the lift as the guards apprehended the scientist, who looked confused at her thinly veiled threat.

“Take him…where, ma’am?”

Ashelin knew exactly where she wanted that beast to go, but she used all of her remaining restraint to carve out a more appropriate response.

“Out of my sight.”


End file.
